Traktor’s Secret Update: Resizable Controller Manager

Just a quick news item that will make Mapping enthusiasts very, very happy: when the brand new update to Traktor Pro 2 (version 2.5.1) came out a few weeks ago, we were excited by the advanced CDJ HID integration and a few critical bug fixes that plagued users in the initial 2.5 update. But even in the official changelog was missing one of the most simple but important features included in this update: a resizable Controller Manager window.

It has stayed relatively quiet, and in fact we only found out based on a Twitter hint from one of our followers, but at long last this basic usability feature allows users building advanced mappings to resize Traktor’s Preferences window just by clicking and dragging on any of the edges of the window. The Controller Manager table expands to whatever size you want, and each individual column can of course be resized as well.

Users (especially in our community) have been asking for this simple change for years, and it even made it in our Holiday Wishlist last December – so we’re very glad to see it finally included.

We’ve confirmed that this works in 10.7/10.8 as well as on Windows 7 – let us know in the comments if anyone isn’t able to resize their window!

The 2.5.1 update was launched on July 24th, and is a free download for anyone with a version Traktor Pro 2 by running Native Instruments’ Service Center application.

Sad state of Traktor development when it took “only few” years to implement something any developer would be able to do in 30 minutes.

Anonymous

To be fair, it’s a little bit trickier for them to do this then for other app developers: Traktor appears to use its own UI library to make it more portable between Mac and Windows. Because of this, resizing a window isn’t as easy as it is in programs that make use of Mac/Windows user interface API’s. It’s the same reason it’ll be hard for ableton to support dockable subwindows/toolbars, even though tons of programs have them.

Traktorman

I’d like to see any developer implementing this in 30 minutes into Traktor – you have no clue – really

It is a shame that NI doesn’t prioritize the needs of their users. I would love to see Traktor 2.6 released without anything new and fancy. Just improvements from the community.

But we cannot blame the developers for this lack of progress. Devs usually want to fix their code and improve the user experiance. It’s executives who cannot accept investing money on changes that are not marketable to new consumers.

This is a universal problem in programming and with capitalism.

Anonymous

Agreed! Someone needs to get it into their thick sculls that making their already “won” customers even more happy definitely also means more sales.

100% agree. You can’t really blame those in charge either though… new features make money and get attention… while devs spend their
days dreaming of going back and putting in that last 10% of work to
make everything perfect (which is always the hardest part) the ones in charge have to balance that with a need to attract new customers with limited time and money to invest.

Not if they program the iTunes integration to just read the playlists. And it could be an option to let iTunes change ID3 data and such.

Dennis Parrott

the real issue probably IS NOT the NI engineers here… Apple has been somewhat hostile toward “outsiders” trying to leverage iTunes in their products. Apple makes so many changes to iTunes that it is difficult to keep up — and they don’t “seed” those changes to the developer community before release as they do with the Mac OS X or iOS development communities.

Basically, anyone trying to “hook into” iTunes is (potentially) screwed anytime there is a new iTunes release coming out. They get blind-sided.

What’s worse is that iTunes ends up as the Center of the Universe with respect to iPhones, iPods and iPads. It is like that doggone Veg-O-Matic thing from the late night infomercials of my youth — it slices, it dices, it writes letters to your Mom! — because it has to manage all kinds of non-music media as well as (poorly) sync/shuffle that media around. Because it has to be that CotU thing, I feel that we end up with an unstable product with respect to being able to use it as a professional music library tool.

I use iTunes on my Macs but I really don’t like it. I have a list of gripes about how it works and doesn’t a mile long….

Maybe what DJs really need is a For-Real Music Database tool with a For-Real API that products like Traktor and Serato can hook into.

But isn’t iTunes software that creates and XML file as essentially a list containing a representation of your media on disk? And could not Traktor read/write/manipulate this list? Perhaps I am making it sound more simple than it is?

It’s very welcome, but the columns don’t automatically scale to width. Thumbs very much up, but there’s a lot of room for improvement (I’d like to see color-coding for different controllers with MIDI assignments) and a little more help regarding what you can and cannot do with maps.

Spacecamp

Perhaps a redesign of the entire preferences will come soon as it’s one of the more clunky aspects of using Traktor… we can hope, right?

Anonymous

We can hope! It’s certainly really irritating that it’s taken this long, but the fact is that it’s not a high priority for their business model. They seem to be emphasizing hardware integration over software flexibility… If they make the mapping window a breeze to use however you want, you could map up 4 trigger fingers to make all your dreams come true, and then how would they sell F1’s?

Anonymous

Yes, we can.

I am just very, very happy I can resize the window, so everything fits in one view. That makes mapping so much better. The next step would be to improve the mapping system itself, which NI had mentioned it soon wants to attack. Can’t wait to see what they come up with.